A Time of Magic » Marketing

Automating the invitations

admin — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:34:52 +0000

We’ve all moved on miles from the days when the kids would hand make their birthday invitations for their friends, haven’t we?

These days hardly anybody would think of doing them by hand so we’re constantly regaled by cards produced to professional level standards. Even the business of printing your cards on your own printer is going away to be replaced by ones done by professional printers, albeit to your own design of course.

It does save a heap of time naturally but I do miss receiving the hand drawn invitations.

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Do you breast-feed?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:13:10 +0000

Breast-feeding seems to come in cycles like many things.

After the major promotion of breast-milk a decade or so back with campaigns to make it more socially acceptable in public areas, the interest in it seems to have died down considerably in recent years. Ten years back and you’d have seen women making a point of feeding their baby in public but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it done in a public place.

Whether that reduction in the visibility equates to a reduction in the amount of breast feeding being done is quite another questions obviously. The benefits of it certainly haven’t changed and it makes a great start in life for your baby as it always has done. Is it just that it’s become less acceptable to do it in public these days?

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Do you buy when they add the super- or hyper- labels?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:08:09 +0000

Ordinary things never seem to be quite enough for us these days, do they?

Just about every product seems to come in super- or hyper- or some equivalent to that. If it isn’t that, there’s the temptation to imply that it contains some prohibited ingredient or other. Hence probably the current promotions of hydroxycut reviews in the diet pill industry.

There’s nothing explicitly “wrong” about this kind of promotion of course but it does seem to be nearing the end of its life at the moment as more and more people are becoming immunised against this type of marketing. What will come next though?

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A fancy name for a walkway

admin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:14:33 +0000

Greenways are the in thing these days basically because they let councils show an eco friendly face, use what would ordinarily be waste land and collect lots of grant money.

That said, they do provide genuine advantages to the communities through which they run. For instance, the disused railway embankment behind our house had became largely a muddy path surrounded by weeds which were regularly set fire to over the summer. That was maybe a decade or so ago when they decided that it should be a greenway.

Over a fairly short period of time, the muddy path was replaced by a tarmac one, the weeds were cut back and trees were planted along the route. We all thought that the burning would continue but in fact it’s never happened since.

The only downside now is that the greenway was put in a little bit too soon as it doesn’t have the lighting that later ones have so you can’t really use it at night. In fact, that’s just one of a whole raft of improvements that we’ll see in a second similar scheme that’s being created as from this November. I’ve walked along parts of what’ll be the new route and they seriously need a cleaning out but in a few years time that’ll all change.

A bit of a gimmic name-wise, but one that’s worth having for all the plus points that it attracts.

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Why do we keep some promotional items and not others?

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:30:31 +0000

If the marketing companies could get a definitive answer to that question we’d be even more inundated with the give aways than we are at the moment.

Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the Â£60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.

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Loyalty card marketing can be dumb sometimes…

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:19:08 +0000

Not too far from us we’ve a major shopping area with two major supermarkets on opposite sides of a dual carriageway.

In principle, it should really matter which we go to as the competition should level out any pricing differences given that they’re so close to each other. Well, perhaps in principle but in practice there are major differences in the pricing.

Thus we do almost all our shopping in one of those supermarkets and largely ignore the other one. That in turn seems to seriously confuse the marketing algorithm that the loyalty card system in the lesser used supermarket uses. Every time we go (which works out at maybe a couple of times each month) we get what seems like a crazy offer from them yet when we go back to use that offer we don’t get anything comparable afterwards.

Now, I can understand that tactic being useful when a supermarket opens as a way to attract customers from the other supermarket. Why they do it getting on for ten years on is something of a mystery though.

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Is seeing the country’s political leaders on TV actually worth it?

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:16:31 +0000

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

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First birthday invitations: a special time for your child

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:57:54 +0000

Once you’ve gotten the birth out of the way, the first significant milestone for your child is their first birthday and so first birthday invitations mark what’s probably going to be an occasion that’s more memorable for you than it is for them.

That said, this is one of the first times that your child will be making their mark on the social calendar of life and so it’s worth putting that little bit more effort into the event. From the perspective of others that’s probably going to start with the invitation that they’ll receive which very much sets the scene for the event for them.

Naturally, you’ll want to continue the theme throughout the event as much as you can to make it a truly memorable time for all who participate in it but remember that it’s the first contact with the invitees that really sets the tone for the party.

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Just how high can they go in Las Vegas?

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:49:57 +0000

Las Vegas, as always, is the land of excess in every way and the Stratosphere hotel takes that excess upwards with its hotel building towering above the Vegas skyline.

Although the hotel might be high the prices certainly aren’t. Typically for Las Vegas you get relatively low prices for extremely high quality hotel experiences. Yeah, I know, “hotel experiences” sounds very marketing-speak but in Vegas they take into account the whole deal rather than just having a decent mattress and a couple of freebies in the room so it’s very much the whole experience that ends up high quality rather than just some individual items as you’d find in other destinations.

Combined with the height of the building, the rides available are themed with altitude in mind so this probably isn’t the hotel to go to if you’re not too keen on heights.

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Just what toy should you get the kids?

admin — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:25:08 +0000

The biggest problem these days with toys is probably that there are so many adverts on childrens’ programmes that the kids have just way too many suggestions for you.

However, the toys that they see on the adverts themselves aren’t the only thing altering their desires in terms of toys as many of the programmes themselves are end to end product placements and merchandising. Probably the worst of these at the moment is Hanna Montana which is probably the largest advertisement that the world has ever seen. I can side-step that particular one as I’ve just got boys but given the success that it’s seen I’m sure that there’s a similar effort planned for little boys too.

What you do need of course is a balance in the toys that you get. Thus you don’t want to be ending up buying only computer games for example. Ideally you should end up with a mix of indoor and outdoor toys, a mix of educational and purely fun ones, etc. Hard to achieve certainly but it’s worth keeping that idea of a balance in your mind when you’re out looking for them.

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